Gulags in the sun

Thomas Keneally has taped his mouth shut in silent protest at the inhuman immigration policy of his homeland, Australia. Here he lets rip about the detentions, and the deceit surrounding them, that are so corrupting of politics

The other week, on Australia Day, I was involved in an Australian citizenship ceremony, at which we sang:

'For those who've come across the seas We've boundless plains to share... '

It seems to some Australians a great loss of innocence that such anodyne lines cannot now be sung without a shared wink of irony with a kindred soul, someone as disappointed as I am over the Australian government's infamous detention policy for asylum seekers. The truth is that there exist in our plain outer suburbs, such as Villawood in Sydney, and in our desert towns, such as Port Hedland in Western Australia, double-walled gulags for would-be refugees. Those who, with documents or without, sincerely or opportunistically, come from afar to seek asylum have been detained and isolated there, as a virus too toxic to be released, behind high walls topped by razor wire.

They are detained not for six weeks, not merely until it's discovered that they had dangerous intentions or connections, but for years on end, pending a final decision on their status. Then, if their application and any appeals fail, they are detained pending repatriation, in many cases for years. The apolitical infant fugitives are detained along with their supposedly dangerous parents.

The depression and loss of hope and dignity created by the penal conditions in these places is palpable to all visitors, except maybe the minister for immigration. Given the unmentionable reality that many of these people will become Australian residents and citizens, and will have to take their poisoned childhoods with them into the Australian community, you could be excused for seeing the policy as socially dangerous as well as odious.

It's a pity that the existence of these penal settlements in our midst has not generated as much whimsical comment as we Aussies are supposed to be renowned for. Nor does the fact that the company that until now has administered these camps is Australasian Correctional Management, a subsidiary of the Wackenhut Corporation of the US. In other countries, Wackenhut runs prisons; hence the proud adjective "Correctional". To Australasian Correctional Management our government gave over the guarding, catering, health, welfare and education services at immigration detention centres. As a descendant of some convict great-grandparents - my wife can make the same proud boast - I am very grateful that the British government, in conveying its dissatisfied and erring clients to Australia, did not outsource "guarding, catering, health, welfare and education services" to a foreign subsidiary, but made them what they were, a duty of government surrounded by basic safeguards.

Asylum seekers are not of their nature a criminal issue. (Indeed, neither were my forebears, but that's another tale.) According to the internationally agreed definition, a person claiming refugee status is one whose presence within our borders is based on a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality or membership of a particular social group or of political opinion, and who is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of his own country and seeks protection in another. Since to seek asylum is a universal right, one wonders what needs correcting in the impulse behind it. To justify that word - correctional - an entire rhetorical arsenal has to be put in place and aimed at the asylum seekers. They are rarely legal immigrants; their claims are bogus; they all destroy their documents if they feel it will improve their chances; they are queue-jumpers, a terrible thing to be in any country that plays cricket, etc, etc.

In August 2001, Australian SAS troops were sent on board the Norwegian freighter Tampa to stop the captain putting into Christmas Island with 433 asylum seekers. He had rescued them from a sinking Indonesian boat in the Indian Ocean. These travellers were accused by the then immigration minister Phillip Ruddock of having made "a lifestyle choice". They had previously, he said, been perfectly secure in Indonesian camps. There were "perceptions", he said, that "Australia is a soft touch". Despite the greater and more efficient propensity of terrorists to take planes, the risky boat route some Australian detainees had taken was, according to the then minister of defence, Peter Reith, "a pipeline for terrorists to come in". The pipeline had to be cut, and Australia must be a soft touch no longer!

One of the results was such grotesque legislation as the excision of a number of our islands - Ashmore, Cocos, Christmas - from Australia's immigration boundaries. The people who reached them in dangerous boats had no right to take a breath and claim asylum. Excision has continued according to convenience. Wits say that, for immigration purposes, ultimately everything will be excised, except a table in a shopfront in the main street of Alice Springs, which the applicant must somehow reach in order to gasp out the request for asylum.

The perceived crisis created by Tampa also led to the grotesque Pacific solution, where aid-client states such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea were offered inducements to become "declared countries" to which the asylum seekers would be sent for processing. The Pacific solution became a huge expenditure. To keep a detainee on Christmas Island became as expensive as sending him to Harvard. It has also led to squabbles between Australia and tiny Nauru over whether promised money has been paid, and who is responsible if detainees go on hunger strike.

The tough response to border security might to some eyes have seemed unnecessary, but it played superbly for the Liberal-National party coalition led by John Howard. Not that there was much opposition from the parliamentary Labor party, which until recently saw the policy as too popular to challenge.

As Britain's Labour government itself summons up the sinew to get real tough, new Australian Labor leader Mark Latham has condemned the policy of detention for indefinite periods, and has promised to release the children. His focus is on preventing people-smuggling across the dangerous seas that separate us from Indonesia. Like his British colleagues, he does not want to be too kindly when it comes to financial support and healthcare for the asylum seeker. But at least he has not come up with David Blunkett's infamous proposal to place children as hostages in care to encourage their parents to leave the country voluntarily.

Even so, among the major Australian parties, any compassion for the asylum seeker, for the journey he has made, seemed until recently the love that dare not speak its name. In a rare exception, Carmen Lawrence, formerly premier of Western Australia and now national president of the Labor party, resigned her opposition portfolio over it. But if a private citizen raised concern over detention, he was asked, "Surely you can't want just anyone to come in?" Detention was, it seemed, the only adequate exercise of sovereignty.

Detention was not the only problem. The apparent capriciousness of decisions added to the misery. One member of a family might be accepted, but another not. A young journalist from Ivory Coast, Cheik Kone, recently released after years in Port Hedland detention centre, found that in a previous application the tribunal assessing his case had used an out-of-date fact sheet on the country, which declared it stable. Another detainee, Hassan Sabbagh, a middle-aged teacher who fled Iraq after he had lost two children and a brother under Saddam, is in his fourth year of detention, and reasonable people can't understand why he was not granted asylum. As one Australian journalist says of him, "You would have to commit a violent crime and have a criminal record to be jailed for such a period."

An Iranian Catholic I know suffered acute psychiatric illness in detention and was given a visa that enables him and his wife to live in the community, in this case a Sydney convent, but without the possibility of being permitted work or of public healthcare. This talented young couple, with plenty to contribute, are living diminished lives without ultimate hope.

It is sad now to see mythology about Australia being "a soft touch" being appropriated by British politicians and tabloids. Both in Australia and the UK, some would have us believe that on a slow day in some tyranny, or in a humourless and persecuting theocracy, families decide that they can have some real fun at last by abandoning houses and possessions, by hiding on trucks and trains, by marching over guarded borders, by living as an underclass in refugee camps and risking violence, disease and despair, by braving dangerous seas in questionable boats or hiding in cargo containers, all for the huge fun, the global jollity, of outraging the immigration ministers of our respective nations.

Yet governments should step back from Australian-style detention for asylum seekers not only because it is inhuman. They should do so because of the capacity of a detention policy to corrupt the practice of politics. It has corrupted the Australian polity and has the power further to corrupt the British system.

In a representative democracy, to make the majority happy with the detention of asylum seekers a government needs to lie about them as robustly and unabashedly as ours has. In early October 2001, with an Australian federal election about to occur, we saw immigration minister Ruddock, Reith, who as minister for defence had best cause to know it was a lie, and prime minister Howard all embroidering a story that refugees had thrown their children into the sea from the ship designated SIEV (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel) 4. It was a means of imposing upon the mercy of the navy. "What sort of demonic people would do this to their own kids?" rang the prevailing sentiment. Howard declared: "I can't comprehend how genuine refugees would have thrown their children overboard."

Within a day, the government was advised by officials that there was no evidence that any children had been thrown overboard. But this story, declared unfounded by advisers and by the commander of HMAS Adelaide, was maintained throughout the successful election campaign that followed. Only the following February did Reith admit that he had been advised that claims about children overboard were unreliable.

A less clear evasion and line of deceit is found in the case of the sinking of SIEV X, a grossly overcrowded and illegal 19-metre vessel, in October 2001 - again during the election campaign. Its loss in the Indian Ocean brought about 353 deaths of Iraqi, Afghan, Palestinian and Algerian asylum seekers, including the inevitable toll of women and children. The Royal Australian Navy had received intelligence of the boat's movements and parlous condition, which it had properly passed on to the federal government. SIEV X was within Australia's declared border protection surveillance area, after all. But no rescue order came from Canberra.

A history of, at best, misrepresentation and, at worst, lies was added to in November last year. The boat that brought 14 Kurdish voyagers turned up on an Australian outer island. The new minister Amanda Vanstone put forth the argument that in their hours of contact with Australian officials, and before being shipped off again, none of them had sought asylum, a claim that she would later have to revoke.

It was in a modest desire to dissent from all the lies told about asylum seekers that I decided to tell the fable, in The Tyrant's Novel, of a tyrant who puts obscene pressure on a novelist to produce a book in 30 days. I wanted to pay tribute to the desperate journeys of such people, so glibly demonised by politicians and tabloids. And the truth is that there is a nation of refugees and stateless people in the world, nearly 50 million, according to reasonable estimates. A Canada and an Australia combined!

This is an international human crisis. But political opportunists prefer to bill it purely as a national security crisis, and a punishment for being too compassionate in the past. The refugee issue will be solved by international goodwill, not by easy demagoguery or dangerous appeals to racism. But these are the forces that have been seen here in Australia, and which seem to be driving policy in the UK.

When the only way you can make a policy work is to lie, then it's a policy best not embarked upon. As for its popularity, that's worth something. But as the former UN high commissioner for human rights Mary Robinson said to our foreign minister, Alexander Downer, "Human rights are not a matter of popularity, minister."

·Thomas Keneally is the author of novels including Schindler's Ark and The Great Shame. The Tyrant's Novel is published on Monday, by Sceptre, at £16.99.